At the trade deadline, the focus is often on the rental market. Contending teams are looking for that final piece but want a short-term acquisition as they can’t afford to keep the player beyond the current season. However, some non-rentals also attract some interest at this time of year. It appears one of them is in Pittsburgh as Daily Faceoff’s Frank Seravalli reports that the Penguins are receiving a lot of calls on winger Reilly Smith, even more than Jake Guentzel, one of the top rentals potentially available between now and March 8th.
The 32-year-old was acquired by Pittsburgh last summer in a move that basically amounted to a salary cap dump from Vegas with Smith, an important part of their Stanley Cup run, yielding just a third-round pick in return. For a player who reached the 50-point mark in four of his six seasons with the Golden Knights, the return was on the light side but in a flat-cap environment, several teams had to make tough decisions like that.
While Penguins GM Kyle Dubas was hoping that Smith would be a key two-way contributor, that hasn’t exactly been the case. Instead, his offensive numbers are down as he has just 10 goals and 15 assists in 51 games so far, not a great return on a $5MM price tag. He’s still averaging over 16 minutes a night, however, and is seeing some action on the penalty kill. In terms of a player profile, Smith is the type of player a lot of teams can use.
Fitting that contract onto the books is difficult enough for this season with half the league currently using LTIR to stay salary cap-compliant. The fact that Smith has another year left on his deal after this one adds to the allure but also adds to the complications of making such a deal work.
Seravalli suggests that Smith could be a candidate for salary retention to help open up his market. Pittsburgh has two of their three slots left while the one they’ve used (Jeff Petry) is on the books through next season. If Dubas isn’t concerned about using a second slot through 2024-25, paying down Smith’s contract to just a $2.5MM AAV would certainly bolster his market and should allow them to get a considerably better return than what they gave up to get him. While it’s not the direction they were hoping for, it looks like Smith could help yield a quality piece for a potential rebuild or retool this offseason.
And Smith has strong interest in going back to Vegas. Not a secret. And Stone will likely go on LTIR through the playoffs.
Guentzel to Vegas on the 8th, to maximize cap space they wait till then to announce it!
Not exactly how that works tho
There are some dilly dallying moves were they send players down for 1 or 2 days and they do add or save cap space every day. I dont understand how it works or what the rules are but a player acquired at the deadline need less space then 1 acquired 3 months prior
Accured cap space, it says roughly a players cap hit is over 186 days and so it is divided over 186 and each day a player is on or off that add or save space. It says a 1M player only counts 500K halfway thru the season so a team only needs to have 500K accured cap space to acquire said player half way through. So essentially if a team was 2.5M under the cap up to the deadline they could trade for a player who had a 5M cap hit at the deadline as they have accured 5M in cap space by that point
I’m thinking what’s fair is to give Vegas three Penguins for the price of on the house.
Oh wait, that’s how they’ve always done business.
Except this doesn’t work in Vegas’s case. They’ve been in LTIR all year – starting with Lehner’s $5MM. Then they added Eichel’s $10MM. CapFriendly says they currently have almost $6.1MM in cap space and will have the same amount at the TDL. You can’t bank cap when you’re in LTIR jail.
What’s interesting is that they haven’t added Mark Stone’s $9.5MM to LTIR. I imagine as soon as Eichel comes off (and it sounds like he’s poised to return), Stone will go on.
I’m not sure why they’re shuttling players up and down from Henderson. It’s not for cap reasons.
Not a secret. But who has actually spoken on this with any authority or insight?
Several league insiders have said very openly that Smith is not feeling Pittsburgh and his preferred destination is Vegas.
@njbirdsfan ?
Wilf states obvious
Truth is nobody. Just media BS
or the GM trying to make a market where none exists
I like Smith, but there are other guys out there scoring as well or better potentially available with similar cap hits.
Time to rebuild, trade and get whatever you can do to improve next years team and the future. Crosby should be the only untouchable..
Easier said than done since the core group all have no trade clauses and ownership wants to sell tickets and wants to keep the aging stars. Trading Smith would be a good move and see if Graves can also be shipped out. Ned should also be worth a late pick to a team that needs goalie help.
Dubie dug a deep grave with the Graves contract. Unmovable!